Catalog 5 is now available online, and new acquisitions are added to the website as they arrive. We’re happy to collaborate with you on a present for someone special, and offer personalized gift cards at any price point.

This year’s fair celebrates the publication of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas and the newly released collection of Jane Jacobs essays, Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs. Jonathan Tarleton of Nonstop Metropolis and Nate Storring of Vital Little Plans will lead a free walking tour of Brooklyn, explaining the intertwined legacies of Robert Moses and Frederick Law Olmsted in the borough, followed by a book signing. We hope to see you there.

Everyone told me that York was beautiful, but I didn’t really understand until I arrived. This walled city — home to Romans, Vikings, and Richard III — hosts the York Antiquarian Book Seminar (YABS) each fall, a great resource for booksellers looking to learn the trade.I gave the enthusiastic (if jetlagged) YABS keynote on a Monday morning, 4 AM Brooklyn time:

And had a wonderful week with the seminar faculty and students. On the YABS faculty side, here are Anthony Smithson of Keel Row Books and Justin Croft:

A fleeting reminder that Honey & Wax will be exhibiting on both sides of the Atlantic in the next couple of weeks, so you really have no excuse not to visit. Please come say hello at the third annual Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair, September 9-11:

And at Britain’s largest antiquarian book fair, the York National, September 16-17:

Rebecca’s back in town (not a moment too soon), with a report on this year’s Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. Reposted from Rebecca’s own rare book blog, Aldine:

Full disclosure: I have just returned from a week at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, and the blush of my enthusiasm is still burning. I want to tell you all about it.

The Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS) is often called Boot Camp for Booksellers. It’s a week-long seminar held in Colorado Springs each summer where the foundations of buying, researching, cataloging, and selling antiquarian books are taught. I was grateful to receive a scholarship from Bibliopolis this year after my Honey & Wax Booksellers colleague Heather, a CABS alumna, encouraged me to attend.

Let’s start with the nights. After dinner we wander over to the tables set up outside our building and talk to each other. Everyone has a story, tales of book scouting hoarders’ houses from Oregon to Italy, of the books we most covet, of the booksellers’ catalogs we most admire. We talk history and obscure facts (a shout out to sword swallowing and neon lights). Above all, we talk about the moment we realized we were in love with bookselling.

Each teller’s countenance glows a bit when they talk about falling in love. I feel like I’m watching fireflies. We bookish types rarely talk so much. We sit outside in the rusty orange light, consume food and drink scavenged from the 7-11 across the street, and take in the spectacle. We are a tribe.

The next morning we stumble blinking into the sunlight and get back to work. Running a business is not forgiving in this world, an odd little corner of life which strikes many as a curiosity at best. There are no shortcuts. There is only your knowledge, your skill, your creativity, your work, and your pragmatism. Only one third of the CABS class from ten years ago is still in business. I mull over the lectures and think: if I don’t do this well, I won’t be able to do it for long.

The faculty doesn’t sugarcoat this. They are unforgiving and even, at times, ruthless. They take pride in the standards of their profession, and they will not see those standards slip. But they are so good at their jobs. It’s a pleasure to watch. I feel honored to know them. I see how they observe each other, play off each other, poke fun at one another. This is part of the business, too. Make no mistake: bookselling is a way of life. CABS sets the standard for it.

Herein lies the seminar’s real value. We antiquarian booksellers have a responsibility in how we seek, research, and sell the printed artifacts of our civilization. While at a certain level we are in competition with one another, in more important ways, we are united in both our temperaments and our goals. We want to make a living, even (dare I say) a fine living. But we also feel a moral imperative to care for these fragments of human thought, to rediscover forgotten paths, and to keep the memory green. And, okay, yes. It may also be the case that we just couldn’t help going down the rabbit hole of research on that obscure little pamphlet we came across the other day. It’s amazing; I can totally sell that.

If you are thinking of entering the antiquarian book trade, go to CABS. If you work in the trade and haven’t yet attended, go to CABS. Even if you’ve been doing this for a while (closing in on a decade for me), go to CABS.

Antiquarian booksellers are typically resistant to this kind of rhetoric. I get it. Most of us have the temperament of a cat; we look with disdain upon those who dare suggest we act a certain way. But this philosophy contains a generous breadth and depth. It asks only that you work hard, ethically, and creatively; that you take pride in what you do; and that you value the role of the antiquarian book trade in the world.

Many of you who are reading this aren’t newer booksellers, or even booksellers at all. For you, attending may not be the right fit. However, if you see the worth in maintaining this world at the highest standards, consider donating to CABS. If you value the antiquarian book trade, demonstrate that your opinion isn’t simply a vague feeling of good will. Be generous in your donation if you can. I’ve donated an amount just large enough to be a bit painful. If you can’t, a small amount is fine, too. Even with $10, you’ll be investing in the future of this gently mad world.

I’m delighted to announce today that Rebecca Romney will be joining Honey & Wax this summer. Many of you already know Rebecca, and those who don’t will soon be grateful that you do.

These past few years, as Honey & Wax has taken off, I’ve become keenly aware of my own limits. There are too many books to catalog, auctions to preview, libraries to build, for one person to cover, and I’ve been frustrated by the number of opportunities I’ve had to let slide. Rebecca’s experience and energy will expand the range of what Honey & Wax can offer collectors and institutions, and enable us to be in two places at once.

After four years gazing through the window — not that the armory offers much in the way of windows — it was a thrill to be back! Thanks to Fine Books & Collections for featuring Honey & Wax in their dispatches from the floor.

After the buying and selling, the packing and unpacking, I spent a restorative spring break in Venice, where I marched a reluctant sixth-grader through the Aldus Manutius exhibit at the Accademia:

No apologies. Totally worth it.

A few days later, in Padua’s Museo del Precinema, we had a wholly unexpected encounter with the magic lantern slides that Proust describes in the opening pages of Swann’s Way, justifying the rare book axiom that anything can be anywhere:

And the hardboiled, jetlagged rare book librarians who also make the annual trip from New York City, Charlotte Priddle of NYU and Karla Nielsen of Columbia University:

Among countless others.

I returned to Brooklyn with a suitcase full of Fortnum & Mason tea biscuits and a group of exciting new books slated for this year’s Honey & Wax catalog. The biscuits are gone. The books, however, you will see soon enough.

Yes, it’s past midnight on the night before our New York Antiquarian Book Fair debut. Yes, we are bringing dozens of newly catalogued books to the armory. No, we have not photographed them. Please. I still haven’t eaten dinner.

But: you can review a copy of our booth list here, and get all the details on the fair here. Come say hello! Booth A33, by the bar.

Hoping to thank many of you in person this weekend . . . and for the longtime friends of Honey & Wax who can’t make it, we’ll be thinking of you too.

2016 has been quiet so far: just a couple of outings to the California International Antiquarian Book Fair (where I got a sunburn), and the Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair (where I regained my usual pallor).But now, in March, all the resources and energies of Honey & Wax are directed toward our ABAA debut at the armory. One month away: the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.